Hartford Accident and Indemnity

 

*

 

Nor is there one of us to be spared, but will be each of us in our turn taken to the pit and cast away.

 

*

I feel increasingly like one of the officers rearranging the deck chairs as the icy water drags the behemoth down. Yes, it’s pointless, but really they do look better arranged in rows of four, don’t you think?

 

We do what we can, we do what seems right, or the least wrong, and there’s beauty enough in that.

 

 

*

 

We have moved out of our house and into our back yard. With our kid and her kid and another baby on the way, we’ve abandoned the house for them and let them have it. The Woman and I have moved into the little studio I built a few years ago that we have been letting the girl and her baby live in for the last two years. By studio I mean a one-room glorified shed.

 

It perhaps sounds nutty but it’s wonderful really. Another opportunity to toss out unwanted shit, to scale back, to simplify, to downsize. Another chance to change things up, shake things up, take charge, move those deck chairs around. Ignore that gnashing and rending sound as the iceberg peels the rivets off the hull plates, there’s nothing to be concerned about. I built us a loft so we can sleep “upstairs” and have a kitchen and living area “downstairs.” Next up is building a bathroom and closet off the studio,which will get underway this weekend weather permitting.

We’re getting our Tiny House on.

 

*

 

We give up space and convenience and receive in return total peace and privacy and the sense of having got into a very smart lifeboat.

 

Well played, sir.

 

*

 

The great good thing is, as always, my woman. Without whom I would be lost and utterly so. She moves in this world in her own way and it is obscure to me, yet I would follow no other. I can’t even use words. None approach her correctly. She’s as pitiless as space sometimes. Yet she consoles me when I wound myself on the hard edges of the world.

 

If I could figure her out, then what? I’d be the poorer for it.

 

I aim to love her till I’m used up.

 

*

 

namaste.

 

 

***

 

Manning the rail

 

“Maybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh: whenever

the script says dances, whatever the actor does next

is a dance. If he stands still, he is dancing.”

– Jack Gilbert, The Great Fires

***

Maybe it is like that.

***

Namaste.

gnawing on it

*

The deep water is unmerciful.

The deep water is unmerciful.

The deep water is unmerciful.

*

*

***

Bitterness and ruin. The self-inflicted gunshot wound of your own life.

There’s a meanness fueled by despair growing in a dark corner of my soul.

***

May I feel this feeling fully. May I take it on without reservation, and may I also have all of the despair and bitterness that you are feeling now or have ever felt. Yours, and yours as well.

Fact of business, would you all please give me all of your suffering? I am suffering already, so pile it on and then you can go on your way a little lighter, perhaps.

And let me give you a little something to take with you in exchange.

Take this small happiness I have.

Go ahead. It may come in useful.

It seems like a tiny amount, but I can give you each the same amount and it won’t run out. Give me your pain, and help yourself to my happiness.

***

My happiness yesterday was a dream. My despair today is a dream. My love, my grief, my loneliness, my strength and courage, my stubbornness and failures, all dreams.

No more to them than smoke on a foggy morning.

The phenomenon of thoughts and emotions arise and I take them as real, as existing, as kind of solid things outside myself or inside myself, but compelling and real.

But last night I dreamed that I was on the deck of a burning ship, flames and explosions all around. I manned a hose, flooding the inferno with icy cold seawater. Hoping I could put out the flames without sinking the ship.

My skin burned with the heat and my hands ached with the cold from the seawater coursing through the thick canvas hose. The ship heaved under my feat, the flames roared, the hull groaned.

It seemed pretty damn compelling.

It’s the same thing when I’m awake. All these events happen and I believe in them. But a little while later, the whole thing has changed, just like in a dream. I was at work, trying to solve some murder. Then I was in the bathroom, giving the grandbaby a bath, trying to hold him still so I could scrub his ears. Then I was in the back yard, fixing the fence, feeling the sun beating down on my neck, swinging a hammer. Bees in the garden droning. Then you were holding my hand. Then I was sobbing and you were angry. Then I was washing the dishes.

On and on.

None of it adhering.

Try to go back and get one of those moments, they’re gone as smoke, impossible to grasp.

Peer into the future and see one coming. You can’t. You’re wrong about it every time.

Just this one moment, arising like a dream out of some vast bed of potentiality, blossoming, breaking, erupting into being, then dissolving away. One after the next, in an endless cascade.

Real pretty to watch, even if it’s sometimes ugly.

Even if it was always ugly, still beautiful and astounding.

*

That’s how I can take all your suffering onto myself. It’s just an illusion. Same with giving all my happiness away.

It’s an illusion, but a vivid one.

A magic show.

*

You don’t need to go around taking it so serious.

I mean, of course, me.

*

namaste.

***

Refuge

 

 

 

*

 

The instruction is to take on the suffering directly, without artifice.

 

*

 

What I see is how much I make a mess of things by acting unskillfully when I am angry and frightened. It seems so important in the moment to say that hurtful thing, to lash out, to punch something, to flee, to scream, to drink the rest of that bottle.

 

My equanimity is far away, like a ship that’s almost sailed over the horizon, ever diminishing.

 

When I can look at it, I’m ashamed and chagrined at my behavior.

 

I seem a stranger to myself. Who did these things?

 

 

*

With practice, though, there’s a little bit more awareness. Sometimes it comes in time to prevent the unskillful actions, sometimes it arrives in the midst of them, sometimes only in the wrecked aftermath.

But more and more often it shows up in time.

 

Not reliably so yet, but I can see some progress.

 

*

I’m sitting in the burned out wreckage of one of those times when I failed to wake up in time. Scorched wires and acrid smoke in the air, metallic taste in my mouth, my heart emptied out.

 

One more in a long string of failures.

 

*

I think one of the helpful things about my practice is that it points out to me that these things are my own, that they do not come from outside of me. Despite what my ego tells me, they’re not someone else’s fault. It really does arise from my fearful ego screaming to get what it wants, what it demands, and me letting ego have its way.

Like letting a two year old take the wheel. It wants to go to Chucky Cheese, but the little fucker can’t drive for shit and of course he wrecks the car and there’s nothing but blood and smoke in the air and shattered glass and sirens and you look at him all stunned and bleeding, the airbag deflating around his little tow-headed self and he’s like, “the fuck you let ME drive for?”

Good question.

*

So, try to be with the thing itself. Try to be with what’s really occurring, and not so much with what the ego is screaming at you. Tell the ego, “You know what? I’m driving, and we’re going to the store for some groceries, and it’s going to be fine. You settle on down. If you’re nice, maybe you can have a cookie when we get home.”

Then drive to the store, get what you need.

 

It’s not so bad, the way things are.

 

*

 

The other thing is it can be helpful to recognize that everyone just wants to be happy, and all the stupid shit they do to hurt themselves and everyone else is just shit they’re doing in the mistaken belief that it will make them happy, that it will stop the bleeding for a second. They just don’t know any better.

Like me. Like you.

 

So, you have a little tenderness in your heart for them. And you throw yourself a bone, too. You’re not so bad.

 

You’ll do better next time.

 

*

 

namaste.

 

***

Shipwrecked

 

 

*

 

It happens.

 

You fall asleep at the helm, you’re below getting a peanut butter sandwich, working on the bilge pump, you drift off course.

Onto the rocks.

*

 

Maybe the first you notice of it is the rending and crashing of the rocks driven right through the hull, or maybe you’ve seen it coming all the long night, those dark shapes looming and the roar of the surf growing louder, but the pull of the tide drags you inexorably towards your doom.

 

 

Your efforts to get her turned around futile, and too late.

 

*

 

What’s he doing there?

Consoling her?

 

Or himself?

 

Holding on to her so he won’t fall, or so she won’t flee?

 

Does he got the first idea of what?

 

Maybe he dragged what was left of their craft out of the rocks and built them that house on stilts out there where they could still smell the salt air and hear the sea’s lament.

 

Maybe he aims to drown them both.

 

She’s got her own ideas, that’s clear.

 

I don’t think we’ll know but if we come back in a while there’ll just be empty beach where this small drama played itself out.

 

***

 

I hope you are all well and happy in your particular way.

 

Namaste.

 

*

 

 

 

Sailors dream of drowning

 

 

The nice thing about having recovering addicts in your life is that you get to know each day that there’s no ground beneath you, no guarantee that tomorrow will be like today was.

It helps to point out how desperate our desire for stability and comfort is, and how illusory either one of those goals really are, addict or no. The reality is that anything we love can be taken from us at any moment, every moment that we’re here drawing breath. Is it difficult to live knowing that your nightmares, now dormant, can come back to life at any moment? Or is it better to pretend that they won’t, that the long night is over and here in the clear light of day everything is going to be fine and there’s no monster under the bed?

I think it’s better to see clearly how things are.
And to take that little bit of clarity and stretch it, expand it. It’s not just that your beloved addict might relapse and begin using again and once more pour gasoline over everything and toss a lit match on it- it’s that you might choke on a chicken bone at lunch, or they find a tumor on your heart, or a big rig slams into your wife’s car on the way home from work.

It really is like that.

I often dream of dying, usually in a plane crash, but in other ways, too. And you want to turn to your loved ones and take their hands and tell them you love them.

Well, we’re all on a plane that’s going down.

 

Hold on tight.

 

***

 

The real beauty of this world is revealed when you look at it with as much clarity and wisdom as you can muster. Really look, really see how it is. All that death, all that suffering, makes of this world a beautiful, heart-wrenching paradise. A paradise where everything you love will be wrenched away from you, where the innocents are tortured and slaughtered before our helpless eyes, or even at our own hands. The world exactly as it is contains every heaven, every paradise, every hell that’s ever been or will be imagined.

Once you lay claim to the fact that there’s no safety for you and never has been, that safety is not an aspect of reality at all, you’re free from expending all of that effort to attain something that is, even in its fullest realization, only provisional and temporary. Safe for a day. Safe for a week. A month or a year. But someone’s coming for you, and you’ll have to answer that knock.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want the children to be tortured and killed, the planes full of people to vanish, the machetes to swing in the night. But that’s how it is here. That’s what happens. Has always happened and will always keep happening. And not just us, you know, not just the bad humans. The slaughter is everywhere unabated in the animal realm. There’s no pity in the eyes of a lion or hyena. The incredible vast scale of killing and eating that goes on and has always fueled the machinery of life is almost impossible to comprehend.

And don’t even think about the pitilessness of cosmological actions. Entire worlds vanish, whole solar systems get wiped out in the blink of an eye.

We’re alive in a very tenuous way.

***

 

So, knowing this, what now?

 

You can weep, tear your hair, rend your garments, wail against the injustice of it all. You can build your shelter in the ground and stock it with provisions and stay there till the end of the world, you can numb yourself with television and every modern toy to distract you from what’s coming, if that’s what you want.

Or you can open your eyes, take a look around, and enjoy the ride.

I mean, what the fuck else is there?

 

Oh, yeah. Love everyone.

 

I mean, love their guts out.

 

The poor things. They’re all doomed anyway. Why not give them a little hug, a smile, a tender word?

 

***

 

Namaste.

 

***

Tending to the Raiments of Our Lord

 

 

 

 

 

*

 

It feels good to do art again.

 

Real good.

 

*

 

Anyone who wants to invite me back to their fancy-pants invitation only blogs is welcome to do so.

 

Rebecca.

 

*

 

la-di-da, la-di-da.

 

*

 

namaste, ya sons a bitches.

 

*

Shamar Rinpoche

 

***

 

So, that’s a picture of me with my teacher, Shamar Rinpoche, the 14th Shamarpa of the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism.

This picture is a big deal to me.

 

***

 

Since I took my blogging break I became a really serious student of the Dharma, and it’s been an incredible experience.  Very helpful, very beneficial in a direct way. I have a long way to go but I am already a healthier, happier, and more compassionate person.

This path is an astounding thing for me, and I will probably be talking a lot about my experiences here, just because it is such a big part of my life now.

I don’t know what that will look like yet, but I thought I’d at least give you fair warning, so you can spare yourself if this isn’t your cup of tea.

 

***

I hope that you are happy, and that you are loved, and that you get everything you want and nothing you don’t want.

 

so there.

 

*

 

and I miss my wife.

 

***

 

namaste.

 

***

We Are Told of Many Glories

 

 

maybe i don’t got nothing to say after all.

 

here’s what though. tonight I’m going over to my Mom’s house for my grandmother’s 90th birthday with my 22 yr. old pregnant daughter and my two yr. old grandbaby and that’s a long spread of years of which I am smack in the middle.

you start to get the sense that you really are on a shuffle down a long, winding chute that narrows to a little shaft at the end of which is a man with a pneumatic bolt gun that’s going to drop you like a bad habit.

meanwhile all them kids get in line behind you, start pushin’ you on.

in a big hurry, too.

 

***

 

What I will say is that I have an appreciation for all of this beauty in the midst of all of this horror and I guess they get on all right together.

 

I am glad of my wife, glad of other sufficiencies.

 

***

 

namaste.

 

 

Three On a Match

 

Okay, it’s been a while I guess.

I admit it.

A year and a half about. I enjoyed the time off, I really did. But I missed this place and I missed doing art and I really missed you.

Any of you that’s still left.

I’m not going to try and catch you all up at once. It can be a kind of slow conversation, easygoing.

What’s going on for me is that after my computer busted I just laid off for a long time. All my images are trapped on a hard drive I can’t access until I buy a new Mac or do more serious homework on figuring out how to pull them out onto a Windows machine.

So, I’m starting over, which isn’t bad at all. Clean slate. Fresh stuff for my eyes and my head.
In my life, it’s much the same and totally changed. My wife is off in the Dolphin camping out by Lake Isabella, getting windblown and isolated, but I am pretty sure she’ll come back. Our little girl is going to have another baby in a little while and she seems to be doing well, all in all. That grandbaby is a pistol and I love him more than I know how to stand.

I am pretty serious about my Buddhism and my sitting practice now although I will try not to bore you with it too much. It is my main focus and how I try to live right and not harm others. I will let you know when I get enlightened.

I feel like I should say more here, but….

there it is.